


it will be tomorrow soon

by ghost_lingering



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Chromatic Character, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-31
Updated: 2010-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Yusuf's bedroom is the only place where he lets his grief rest.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	it will be tomorrow soon

**Author's Note:**

> I have had this backstory for Yusuf in my head for ages. Initially, I wrote it as a kink meme prompt. Then I was actually going to write the thing as part of a longer Yusuf fic, post-film, but I didn't like where that story was going. Later, it was going to be part of a series of ficlets about all the ways that I think the PASIV technology is fucking creepy and skeevy, but I got so depressed with my version of the characters in light of all the fun slashy Inception fic that I abandoned it. So. Now it stands alone.

Yusuf drinks water every night before he sleeps and sets his alarm just early enough for it to be uncomfortable and when he is falling into sleep his mantra is, "It will be tomorrow soon."

He is not an insomniac, not quite. But he sleeps fitfully, and always wakes feeling more tired than when he started. His dreams leave him unsettled and thinking of rain. He always remembers them like deja vu the next day, bicycling or mixing chemicals or petting his cat:

 _He is on a boat, floating down a river that circles back onto itself. He isn't sure how he knows that the river flows around, save that the boat follows the ever present bend to the right. Floating on the surface of the river are pieces of paper. He doesn't look at them closely. He doesn't want to fall into the water. He isn't sure how long he has been on the boat or why he is on the boat or how the boat moves down the river, but he knows that he has to get off. Somewhere on land, he thinks, there is a mosque and inside that mosque is something he lost. He is about to use his hands to paddle the boat to the bank of the river, but the wind picks up and picks up the papers on the water and rains them back upon him in large drops that break the surface of the river again and again and again and he is overcome by papers and papers and papers and more papers and he is choking and breathing in the soggy rot of wood pulp and ink._

Every few weeks he gets too tired and he downs one of his compounds and shudders with the bitter aftertaste that lingers several days afterward. It is only on these nights that he does not dream.

He sleeps on the left side of a queen sized mattress that is too large for his over-small apartment. The headboard is the only sentimental possession he took with him to Mombassa. It was a wedding gift from his parents, who in turn got it as a gift for their wedding, from his mother's great uncle who carved wood and made it look alive. When Yusuf got married they gave it to him and on his wedding night his wife curled her fingers around the wood and traced its curves and he could not imagine anything more lovely than her, sharing his bed.

 _He is standing under an archway, and when he shifts his weight between his feet he feels the uneven curve of cobblestone through the soles of his loafers. The archway is shallow, only a few hands wide, but it is tall and he does not look directly up for fear he will not see the top._

 _He stands there, unsure of how he got there or why he is standing. He contemplates motion and as he does, the wind shifts and with it comes a splattering of rain and a bright call._

 _"Yusuf," the wind calls, "Yusuf. Yusuf my love," and he finally looks up, to find the archway gone, and the large keystone falling quickly towards his head._

The dream den was there long before he came to Mombassa and will be there long after he is gone. But it has changed, under his watch. When he found it, originally, it was just a group of junkies getting their fix. He turned it into something else. He turned into the place where lost people came to go home.

He doesn't spend much time there he prefers being outside in the sun, talking to people, eating food, laughing. If he has to be inside he prefers it be among his chemicals, experimenting. But, some days, he will sit in the corner of the dream den, and read, or do work, or simply hold his wife's hand. He could visit her, if he wanted, hook himself into the PASIV and let her seduce him into the dream, but even if she is not a projection, it would still be a ghost of her that he is visiting and Yusuf's bedroom is the only place where he lets his grief rest.

 _He is driving a van and it is raining; it is raining and he is driving the van off the bridge and the water seems to shake in the air as time slows. And he thinks: God, when will I wake up?_

After Fischer, after Cobb (after Mal), after the twelve hour plane ride, Yusuf goes home and watches his wife as she sleeps. She eats through an intravenous tube; she is washed daily and shifted to avoid bedsores; her hair is combed; her excrement is cleaned off her legs and tossed into the trash in the alley. He looks at her. Maybe, right now, she is lost in dreams, thinking the dreams reality, but he doesn't think so: when he left her, she knew she was dreaming, and she was in love with the dream. Why wake up to rain when it could be sunny every day in her mind?

He has no projection of her, no hidden desire to join her in sleep. He turns and leaves. He packs light, leaving the den and the headboard and all his ghosts behind him. He is out of love.

**Author's Note:**

> ((Her name is Ruyah.
> 
> They meet at university, in England, when he is a second year doctoral candidate and she is unhappy in last year of her bachelors. He doesn't know it at the time, but she misses her home, her family. In England she is claustrophobic. He is not; not until years later when he visits and sees all the things she must have hated the first time around.
> 
> They fall into dreaming three years later, recruited by the military. They are the perfect couple: he has a background in neurology and chemistry; she has a background in psychology. He warms to it first, she drags behind. She does not see the beauty in the dreams, because she is blinded by the reality: the military wants to use it to interrogate political prisoners, spies, enemy soldiers. Yusuf sees it for what it is: pure, unfettered, creation.
> 
> It is in this time they get married. It is shortly after she gets an abortion and only tells Yusuf afterwards.
> 
> It would be easy to say that she is simply a hysterical woman. That she is unhappy and depressed. That it is the fault of moving to England or getting married or (not) having a baby. That it is the stress of doing the sometimes awful things the military asked of her. But these things are untrue.
> 
> What is true is this: when she was a girl, she would run her fingers along walls to feel their texture, she would make up languages and speak in them, she would wrap the cloth of her mother's scarves around her face to watch the world through brightly colored fabric. What is true is that she loves raunchy jokes, that she hates going into her husband's dreams because he drinks too much water and it rains, that she refuses to wear a bicycle helmet because she cares more about the feeling of the wind in her hair than about the possibility of death. What is true is that she wants, above all things, to feel unfettered.))


End file.
